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Oracle Top Execs Answer Sun Employee Questions
The Register writes "Sun invited Oracle president Charles Phillips and chief corporate architect Edward Screven to an employee-only town hall this Wednesday, where they took questions on what's coming. They said they'd be 'crazy' to close Java, that Oracle 'needs' MySQL, and all Sun's processors look appealing. They hedged on OpenOffice — Phillips said he couldn't comment on any product line — and on Sun's work in high-performance computing. Screven made it pretty clear the Sun vision of cloud computing does not fit with Oracle's; Oracle sees itself as a provider of infrastructure like virtualization to make clouds, not a provider of hosted services. As for who's staying and who's getting cut at Sun: Phillips said Oracle needs Sun, but warned 'tough decisions' will be coming. Don't forget, this is the company that couriered pink slips to the PeopleSoft staff it cut following that acquisition."
Now that Lotus have integrated OpenOffice into Notes 8 Standard and are also pushing Symphony, they are the ones with the incentive to ensure the OO momentum is maintained (not to mention ODF).
In the case of Sun, you have a company that makes (some) useful and reliable products. In the case of peoplesoft, you have a company that makes an obscenely bloated, broken, overpriced software package that has caused havoc and pain across the continent. Peoplesoft was the most similar thing to Microsoft available for takeover for less money than the contents of Fort Knox, and Sun did to them what so many of us would love to do to Microsoft.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
So, Oracle admits they 'need' MySQL, which may or may not complement their core business, but then ducks a question on the future of OpenOffice, saying they can't comment on any product line. Isn't MySQL a product line, too? Why comment on the future of one and not the other? Sun employees, start twisting in the wind...
Light the blue touch-paper and retire immediately.
I think that's the direction sun want's to go with their private cloud stuff. It was called N1 but I'm not sure what's it's called now.
As a large public company, you may not be able to put everything in the cloud like you said, but some stuff you could.
Imagine your public website gets a predictable amount of traffic but every other press release brings a huge spike in traffic, so you have built out your system to handle the peak times so your hardware mostly sits idle.
You could have your own cloud provision spares, but since it's not sensitive data, you can provision computing power from public clouds, like amazon ec2 and just pay for what you need.
OK, maybe not the best scenario but I wanted an excuse to post this link to this Sun HPC software demo that shows Grid Engine sending jobs to private servers, then going to private spares, then pulling in Amazon EC2 instances to handle the load.
Dual Opteron < $600
The day the sale was announced Sun/Oracle had a conference call where Larry Ellison said two of the main reasons they were buying Sun were Solaris and Java. Solaris was the best Unix technology out there he said.
Selling the hardware business to HP was part of a different deal in the bast where Oracle and HP were going to buy different parts of Sun but IBM blocked it according to the article.
Nothing in the recent sale, other than some bloggers speculation, indicates they will be selling off the hardware units.
Dual Opteron < $600
I talked to my manager today, he said we were going to use Postgres instead of MySQL for out next web project.
In his opinion, the latest stable release had poor support for stored procedures and now this acquisition puts further development into question. He wants to move everything out of MySQL at some point.
Since I have never used Postgres before, I couldn't comment on anything, but from my perspective, MySQL had been moving forward with their database. Even if the stored procedures were not on par with the other DB's out there, they would mature in time.
I was ready to speak up, until I thought about MySQL passing hands for the second time, talks about forks, and finally the developers leaving the company. All those things cannot be good short term, and long term will depend a lot on the parent company.
So for the time being, I think my manager is correct and I did not protest his decision.
and Sun Grid Engine, VirtualBox, ...
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
As someone whose first job out of college was as a programmer at Sun, I can honestly say I will never again work for such an academic, transparent company, and that's sad.
I'm not hating myself for it. It's more like the feeling you get when you think back on a time in your life that you know will never come again. It makes you wish you had appreciated it more at the time, because when it's over, it's over forever. Perhaps a bit too romantic and sentimental, but that's just how I feel about the whole Oracle-Sun deal. There really isn't another company quite like Sun, and I mean that in the best way.
Some people laugh at Sun due to its poor business performance, but it really has contributed more to the industry than any other company out there today.